I am honestly curious why, when you learned lesson 1 (Lesson: Don’t quit your job too early), did you not apply it? Find a company in a completely different space, carve out your business in your contract, and work your job while you hone your product. In 3 to 5 years you may very well have a solid growing product, or not, but at least you won't be broke.
Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
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Re: Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
#12Just a hint, a lot of engineers I talk to are desperately in need of career advice and they don't find a port of a call.
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Re: Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
#13I think I understand that you’ve pivoted to selling a resume builder for data science workers. It seems to me from your story that you could use some slightly more hard-nosed business sense. I won’t pretend I know what you should do, but I do have a few reactions to your story and situation. Building out a data science/ML jobs site that is trusted by ML workers is a good idea, and could be really valuable. One downsi…
Thanks a lot for the thoughtful feedback, it's much appreciated it!
Right now the resume builder is general purpose for people wanting to work in tech. We went down the path of charging companies for access to qualified candidates and the lesson we learned is that you first need a critical mass (which is bigger than we initially thought) to make it scaleable.
To get enough job seekers looking for a specific job in a specific location with a specific skillset with a specific number of years of experience (companies are very specific with what they're looking for) requires a large number of job seekers on your platform.
We want to start with a resume builder to provide value to these people at the first stage of their job searching process so we can then layer in more services and tools as we grow to that necessary critical mass.
Eventually, we intend for one of those services to be the forwarding to companies when the candidate matches what the company is looking for and vice-versa.
Re: Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
#14Hmm, why is the $109k in revenue not counted? I'm a bit confused.
Re: Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
#15I almost thought this article was sarcastic. It had all the elements of a “successful” founder. I was reading another article with lessons from the people, and I’ll have to say, this is a great mission: help software engineers put their job search on autopilot. It’s great that you learned a lot
Re: Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
#16Hmm, why is the $109k in revenue not counted? I'm a bit confused.
It was a manual process and not software driven, my understanding. Now, they have a software product.
Re: Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
#17Re: Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
#18I really appreciate posts like these that chronicle the challenges of pre-PMF life. Thanks for writing it.
Re: Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
#19I like the clean design of Beamjobs.com. Wish that was more common.
Thank you, the credit for that goes to my brother. If it was left to me the site would look like some 90s monstrosity.
The same. In the last 5 years my programming skills improved a lot. But my design (in)ability stayed the same.
Re: Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
#20You will not like the path you are on.
- Google Namedropping is annoying like hell and i have seen it plenty of times. You will not feel great if you need to bring that up all the time - When i google for Resumes, resume.io is the first hit with ad and it cost 3$ - When i go to your website, i don't even know that it is a paid product - People really don't care that much about there resumes. I have seen probably 50 or more resumes. They just use the first thing on the internet or a latex template or a word template or they do it with a friend or with family or with a coworker - Your webui actually is as cumbersome as all the companies who require you to apply through their webforms. It doesn't matter how your resume looks when you are looking for a job in a bigger and more known company because you will have to type that stuff in some webform again - Recruiters exists and there are already recruiters who specizalize and are more edgy but you have to realise one big thing: You are entering this recruiter/hiring/resume market. That market is shitty for a reason.
At the end of the day, you are competing with customers which will never return. You have to build a product for this specific use case. If you are not in top 3 of Google Search results, they will not find you and they will not come back because they do not care for a resume after they got hired.
After they got hired and they might start using linkedin etc. recruiters will pester them and those recruiters will use their default templates and map whatever they are able to get into those default templates and no one cares.
I never cared about the layout much, i cared about the content.